Speaking to RPGSite, Square Enix CTO Yoshihisa Hashimoto discussed the future of game development, noting that the lines between pre-rendered and real-time content will be blurred like never before.

For the backgrounds used in this – the mountains, the houses – we are using exactly the same assets as are used in the Visual Works CG version.

Of course, it’s too massive of a data to use in a game as-is, but I think the look and feel will probably remain. If we had time, we could’ve compressed the data even smaller. We didn’t have time to do that, so we just used the same master data – but it can definitely be reduced.

To achieve such astounding visuals, Hashimoto points out that it is going to be a “challenge” to squeeze all of the content on a single Blu-ray. “We have to really consider the mechanism of compressing the data carefully,” he said.